University of Florida CTS-IT: Converting Enterprise Data into Semantic Data/RDF

1. External Publication Database Institutional Data Background At the University of Florida, we use VIVO to collect and display information about many aspects of our institution, with a strong focus on facts about research and academics. The idea is that we can create relationships between various entities, such as two faculty members with similar research focus or awards. Solution For internal data sources, we crafted a database-driven solution to gather institutional data and store it in a curated manner. For our external source, we manually download data. All of the collected data files are then processed by Python applications, which check each entry for details which qualify or disqualify them for inclusion in VIVO. The output is in the form of an add or subtract RDF file which can be processed by VIVO. Division of Sponsored Projects PeopleSoft UF Data Warehouse University of Florida CTS-IT:Converting Enterprise Data into Semantic Data/RDF Ingests Issues At the time we began our work, the University simply had various collections of data – each one by itself and unrelated to any other data source. Many of the data sources were in differing formats, and closely guarded by their caretakers. In fact, publications data is not something the University even has record of. For this, we needed to find a data source external to the University. • Results • Response on our campus has been tremendous. The Office of Research has become interested in VIVO and now has plans to fund much of the work being done. Several departments now use VIVO for faculty reviews – a VIVO profile that has not been properly maintained results in a poor review. Many faculty members are discovering new collaborators on campus by looking at the relationships VIVO has built for them. grants_ingest.py person_ingest.py course_ingest.py publications_ingest.py grants_add.rdf course_add.rdf people_add.rdf pubs_add.rdf people_sub.rdf VIVO.ufl.edu Alex Loiacono1, Erik Schmidt1, Nicholas Rejack1, Chris Barnes1, Mike Conlon2 atloiaco@ufl.edu, cavedivr@ufl.edu, nrejack@ufl.edu, cpb@ufl.edu, mconlon@ufl.edu 1 Clinical and Translational Science Informatics and Technology, University of Florida 2Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University of Florida